The results were eye-opening and in some cases disturbing and the Netmums team wanted to explain more about the findings and why we set out to explore this issue. We know many Netmums members have younger children and may not yet have had to think about or face some of the issues raised in the findings. Netmums founder, Siobhan Freegard, explains more in her own words.

Why we wanted to explore this issue

When I set up Netmums with my two friends, Sally and Cathy, our children were toddlers and babies. We now have children ranging in ages from 10 to 17. All three of us now have daughters of 13 or 14 and through them, their friends, classmates and peers we have become aware of anecdotal information which combined together, suggested some more disturbing aspects of kids and the internet than we, as parents, had previously been aware of.

Until now, we believed that our role in internet safety was:

To ensure we had parental software controls to filter out porn

Ensure our kids are internet safety aware such as not being friends with people they don’t know, never meeting anyone they met online and so on – the green cross code of the internet

Having an awareness of the sites our children are using

However, even with those in place, the stories we heard or experienced or came across included internet addiction, inability to get up or concentrate at school due to late nights online, weight gain, lack of confidence, lack of real friendships or outside activities. And in some ways more disturbing, tales of children seeing inappropriate content and either being upset by it or getting overly involved with it.

We resolved to look at the issue a little deeper and see how widespread – or not – it is.

Our surveys and the research

We ran a survey of over 1100 parents on Netmums and a separate survey of 825 children which was put out through the social networks Facebook and Twitter by two 13 year old girls (my daughter and a friend) to their peers and shared by friends of friends of friends from there. The children were self-selecting and ranged in ages from 7 to 16. The first part involved time spent on line and looked at any consequences.

Parents are increasingly aware of web-linked issues and 75 per cent of parents now implement restrictions on screen time. A third of children (31%) say they accept these restrictions, 57% accept it but find it annoying or upsetting.

Interestingly, it seems children are spending twice as long online as we, their parents, realise each day. While three quarters of us (72.8%) believe our child spends under an hour a day online, children tell us they spend an average of two hours a day.

(I wasn’t enormously surprised by this, I suspect it is a bit like how many biscuits I believe I have eaten in a morning, its easy to tell yourself what you want to believe?).

But interestingly, the children themselves realise when they are spending too much time online, with a third of kids (35%) believing children should spend under an hour a day online – and almost three quarters (72%) suggesting the time should be limited to under two hours.

1 in 5 believe they spend more time online than in the real world, one in nine (11%) admitted they have put on weight by sitting in front of a screen for a long time and a 1/3 say it is harder to concentrate on offline tasks such as reading a book.

Over a third (35.5%) report feeling ‘angry and grumpy’ if they can’t get online while 22 per cent get grumpy when they switch off their gadgets. And half admit going online as they cannot think of anything else to do.

What do we really know about what our children see online?

The second strand of the research involved what children are doing/seeing online. But for me, the real shock in this research was that two thirds of youngsters surveyed (64%) have had a negative experience online. But only 22 per cent of parents were aware of their children having a negative experience online.

So what is it we don’t know about what our children see online?

In this snapshot of 825 children :

Over half of all kids (57%) have accidentally accessed inappropriate content online – although only 9% had looked for it deliberately.

The most commonly seen was animal cruelty, looked at by 26 per cent of youngsters. This was the most common of the “upsetting content” for the younger age groups.

A quarter (24%) had accessed eating disorder and ‘thinspiration’ sites.

20% had looked at self-harm images.

Six per cent have been exposed to violent porn.

18% viewed ‘soft’ porn sites.

One in ten (11%) also viewed suicide sites and child abuse images on the web.

While the majority (77%) have not acted on what they saw – 17.3 per cent said they ‘thought about trying it’.

Of those who did copy what they saw online, 6% per cent restricted their eating, 3.4 per cent self harmed and 3.2 per cent considered or tried suicide.

(I would include more information about the upsetting things children tell us they have seen online but I think it may be too much for many mums, especially anyone feeling a bit vulnerable. Maybe later, if you want it, I can post it in a separate place and you can access it by invite.)

How we plan to further our research

We are teaming up with Oxford University, who will take these findings a stage further and study the issue of children and the internet. We will of course bring you back their findings.

Of course this is just a snap shot of information and for those of you with babies and small children it is unlikely these issues are affecting your family yet and we certainly don’t want to upset you or put you off those entertaining apps and educational and fun websites. But the fact remains that our children are the first ever generation to grow up with the internet in their homes and at their fingertips. We cannot possibly know yet all the implications, both good and bad. Today’s children are, in many ways, part of a giant experiment. As ever with parenting, being forewarned is forearmed so I hope you will take what you can from these findings for now. And thank you so much as always for taking part and sharing your experiences.